McDonalds - Bowne Global Solutions
Masters of homogeneous presentation
Regardless of where you are in the world, the McDonald's experience is the same. A Big Mac is ordered, prepared, served and yes, enjoyed in pretty much the same manner world-wide. McDonalds was building an e-learning software to be localized and implemented world-wide. As such, it required a multilingual/cultural team of technical software testers and a plan to see that the technical team got the most out of the testing process.
A comprehensive Quality Assurance Plan was developed. It included a measurement matrix which was given to the team of 20 testers (2 for each language). Six learning modules were tested in each of the 10 languages. Testers worked on the modules in their mother tongues (International English, French, Canadian French, International Spanish, German, Brazilian, Portuguese, Japanese, and 3 Chinese langueages.) and assured the adherence to the technical excellence of the original US English software.
Luckily Montreal is far from a homogeneous city and with a little effort, finding 20 qualified testers was possible. The test period ran over a period of two weeks. As technical testers we focused on ensuring that the functionalities worked properly in each version. Given that the audio portion was synchronized to the animations, this required many iterations. There was an additional, unexpected benefit to using a multilingual test team, the user experience went through a pre-test test. Many usability issues were identified and could be corrected earlier in the development process than had been planned.